The New York Times is beloved by many liberals, but I despise them. Part of my reason is their role in making the Iraq war happen. I was following it in real time and I remember how they pushed administration lies; the headlines of their articles on Iraq were almost always alarmist and the lead [...]

Now, four years on, the cynic wonders if the president yet has learned what he needed to learn. He has been subject to unprecedented political obstructionism and to a campaign of personal slander unseen in this country since the days when Thomas Jefferson was hiring James Callender to do his dirty work for him back in 1800. Some of the deepest muck from the river basin was churned up to the surface. And there was an audience for it. Rank insanity drove television ratings and made stars out of weeping hucksters. In 2010, the American people — whose essential unity and wisdom he so warmly praised in the speech that made him a star in 2004 — returned a singularly reactionary Congress full of utterly ridiculous men and women. They dedicated themselves to his political destruction, and they proved themselves willing to wreck the country and its economy, and to cause untold pain to millions of Americans into the bargain, in order to achieve it.

Oh, puleeeeze, cry me a fricking river! Is this some kind of joke? Obama has had it easy. Has anyone called his wife a bloodthirsty lesbian who killed Vince Foster? Has he been subpoenaed by Congress to present his birth certificate and explain his whereabouts on the day of his birth? Has ANYONE pursued his connections with corrupt real estate slum lords in Chicago?? Has he had any special prosecutors dogging his steps day after day, calling up his staff, burdening his secretaries with monumental legal bills? Has he had the Supreme Court tell him to suck it up? Well, has he??

No, all he had was an opportunity to turn around eight years of Republican solid waste and use the financial meltdown to institute major reforms using the filibuster proof Congressional majority that we gave him for two whole years.

Let’s be frank here: after the 2008 financial meltdown, most people would have voted for a mixed asian-african american, Muslim, lesbian hermaphrodite if he/she had a “D” after her/his name. And that’s because the American people wanted that person to aggressively fight back against the forces that were destroying their lives.

And when he listened to his Wall Street advisors instead, resulting in more layoffs and more foreclosures, they panicked and swung back the other way. What Obama failed to understand is the severity of the crisis on average Americans, a lot of them, some who had never been laid off before. I’m surprised that the country has remained as calm as it has. That calm may not last too much longer.

I think it’s time the Democratic apologists step away from the poppers and stop blaming the victims. Obama wanted this job, he committed political homicide on his opposition to get it, he knew what was coming and he failed- miserably. Not only did he fail to help, he even made it worse in some cases. Charles Pierce needs to read Neil Barofsky’s book or Ron Suskind’s Confidence Men or Sheila Bair’s new Bull by the Horns. The truth will curl your hair.

It’s not always about race and I’m sick of a certain stratum of progressives pulling that old sledge hammer out to whack us over the head. It is and always will be about the economy, stupid. That’s what Obama has failed to understand. For such a supposedly intelligent guy, you’d think he would have gotten that by now.

I’ve been saying for a long time – and I believe I’ve said it here – Pierce is just like all the rest, when you strip away his wit. I can’t read him. I tried to read this particular piece of drek and stopped forthwith.

Would anyone on this planet make excuses for the utter disgrace Obama has turned out to be if he weren’t half-black? Is that not the utter insult to African-Americans – and, ultimately, sheer racism itself?

Just as Clarence Thomas is. As if Clarence Thomas was the most qualified African-American the SC search could find. Oh, sure.

Obama is not brilliant. He’s a mediocre conventionalist whose highest aspiration is to be in with the in crowd. Done right well for himself, he has. Does anyone remember Geraldine Ferraro’s interview with an obscure West Coast newspaper? Her opinion that Obama was lucky to be black at that point in American electoral history and her take down of his post-partisan nonsense?

I remember that the Obama campaign and his press minions tarred her as a racist and since she was a Hillary adviser, they flung mud on Hillary, too. All this in the face of Obama’s incessant repeating his parents story to emphasize that he was both black and white.

Must be nice to be independently wealthy or instantly more authoritative by virtue of possessing a penis. I’ve heard that some editor took one look at Ezra Klein’s blog postings, immediately declared him brilliant and gave him the gig at the Washington Post. How many women bloggers get that kind of service?
So, you probably won’t hear about the people who care about the economy when the only mouthpieces we have are young guys without families who made out very well for themselves.

It’s distressing, though unsurprising that the intellectual class has chosen to make excuses for the President. He has had and still has plenty of opportunity to help his constituency. He doesn’t, because of lack of concern or incompetence- probably both. There is a mythology surrounding him that bears little resemblance to reality. The truth is Wall Street now controls the policy levers in his administration. This means we will continue to see high unemployment, low growth and high debt. Another laggard debate performance will confirm what voters suspect; he’s not up to the job of fighting for his constituents.

Obama does not think in terms of constituents….he believes he has fans. He wants them to adulate him. He does not want them to demand or need anything. He expects them to vote for him and he won’t give them another thought after the election. He never did and what makes anyone think that he will care in the future.

Struggling with Links, Blockquotes, images or videos?

Since we ran a post yesterday on Indiana's anti-gay law that is pretending not to be one, I thought that was plenty on this topic. However, when Bill Black sent me his brief legal analysis of the bill, I changed my mind. This legislation is a remarkably nasty piece of work. The trick is that the "religious" ground do not have to hew to any org […]

Body: This paper, or pre-draft, or sketch, or whatever it is, started out with this title: "With The 12-Point Platform, this won't happen: An aristocracy of credentialism in the 20%." But then I realized I'd gotten in deeper than I thought -- one of those posts were the framework and the notes overwhelm the original idea -- and as it tur […]